Rural Internet is the access to the Internet from rural areas (also referred to as "the country" or "countryside"), which are settled places outside towns and cities. Its rollout is important for overcoming the disadvantages of the digital divide

Most rural access to Internet is voiceband by 56k modem but poor phone lines in many rural areas, many of them installed or last upgraded between the 1930s and the 1960s, may limit actual download speeds to 23-26k or less. Since many of these lines serve relatively few customers, phone company maintenance and speed of repair of these lines has actually degraded and their upgrade for modern quality requirements is unlikely.

Contents

The United States Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service has provided numerous studies and data on the Internet in rural America. One such article from the Agricultural Outlook magazine, Communications & the Internet in Rural America, summarizes internet uses in rural areas of the United States in 2002. It indicates, "Internet use by rural and urban households has also increased significantly during the 1990s, so significantly that it has one of the fastest rates of adoption for any household service."[1]

Another area for inclusion of the Internet is American farming. One study reviewed data from 2003 and found that "56 percent of farm operators used the Internet while 31 percent of rural workers used it at their place of work."[2] In later years challenges to economical rural telecommunications remain. People in inner city areas are closer together, so the access network to connect them is shorter and cheaper to build and maintain, while rural areas require more equipment per customer. However, even with this challenge the demand for services continues to grow.[3]

In Spain, the Guifi.net project has been for some people the only alternative to get access to the Internet. Usually, neighbors are the responsible to collect the necessary money to buy the network equipment that will do a Wireless link with another zone that has already internet. There have also been cases in which the own city council has invested in the infrastructure.